anatellō

At its plainest this word watches something climb into view. The sun clears the horizon, a cloud builds in the west, and the same verb reports both.

The Bible then stretches that picture. When a light "dawns" on people sitting in darkness, or a morning star "rises" in the heart, the sunrise becomes an image of rescue breaking in. And when Hebrews says the Lord has "sprung" from Judah, the word shifts from the sky to a family tree: a person comes up like a fresh shoot from its stock, echoing the promised Branch that would spring up (צָמַח) in the Hebrew prophets.

The closely related noun (ἀνατολή) carries the same idea frozen into a thing: the "rising" itself, the east where the sun comes up, and even the "Dayspring" who visits from on high.

Here the verb turns causative. It is not the sun that acts but God, who "makes his sun rise on the evil and the good." The one who set the sun going is the reason it climbs each morning, and Jesus points to that daily mercy, poured out on deserving and undeserving alike, as the pattern for loving enemies.

The same word that elsewhere simply reports the sunrise here names the hand behind it.